Wild Fell: A Ghost Story

The crumbling summerhouse called Wild Fell, soaring above the desolate shores of Blackmore Island, has weathered the violence of the seasons for more than a century. Built for his family by a 19th-century politician of impeccable rectitude, the house has kept its terrible secrets and its darkness sealed within its walls. For a hundred years, the townspeople of Alvina have prayed that the darkness inside Wild Fell would stay there, locked away from the light.

Jameson Browning, a man well acquainted with suffering, has purchased Wild Fell with the intention of beginning a new life, of letting in the light. But what waits for him at the house is devoted to its darkness and guards it jealously. It has been waiting for Jameson his whole life . . . or even longer. And now, at long last, it has found him.

From the Sunburst and Aurora Award-nominated author of Enter, Night comes an unforgettable contemporary ghost story in the classic tradition of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.

ISBN: 9781771481595eISBN: 9781771481601

Other CZP books by Michael Rowe:

Praise for Michael Rowe

“Michael Rowe’s talent shines through in this terrifying story of black magic, social persecution, and desire gone horrifically wrong. Readers will immediately identify with the story of Mikey Childress, and they’ll hold on for dear life as Mikey’s search for acceptance and a dream of love drag them across a jagged terrain of brutality and indifference. With October, Rowe taps into the primal terrors of a teen’s life, exploring the loneliness and misery of an outcast who finds his only salvation in a vicious, dark place.”
—Lee Thomas, Lambda Literary Award- and Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The German and Down on Your Knees

“[Wild Fell is a] superb ghost story that evokes terrors both ancient and modern, and delivers us to a place of profound fear.”—Clive Barker

“[A] major new talent. Michael Rowe is now on my must-read list.”—Christopher Rice

“[Wild Fell] by Canadian author Michael Rowe fulfills the Hobbesian ideal of a haunted house novel: nasty, brutish and short. Also, elegant. With more than a little meta-fictional self-awareness—another trope of the haunted house novel post-1820, when the genre was already centuries old—Rowe tells the story of damaged ingénue Jameson Browning, who purchases the titular mansion on a lake-locked outcropping called Blackmore Island after an accident which puts him in possession of a sizable cash settlement. The ghosts are also real in Rowe, this time in the visage of Rosa Blackmore, a spectral teenager who makes known her presence in grim, strobic flashes around the estate. And yet, as in all the best haunted house stories, the specter in Wild Fell is more than just that; it’s a powerful human emotion made flesh—or un-flesh, as the case may be. While over it all loom the spires of Wild Fell: dwelt in by Jameson, dwelling in him.”—Electric Lit

“Michael Rowe writes like a storyteller, so seamlessly that the words disappear under your skin.”—Susie Moloney for CBC Manitoba